The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
Nearly time for that one time of the year you don’t hate yourself and your entire family! Plus Lord Gavin Williamson's Patridgian social media. "Hope it's chips!"
Hello there. It’s week 2 and I’m still here. Thanks for subscribing if you have already. If you haven’t, please do. For each subscribe, imagine me dropping an anvil on one of those cartoon M&Ms - or donating a pound to whatever charity the Daily Mail hates most this week (please do imagine this, but don’t imagine I’ll actually do it).
This week I’ll be inspecting your cries for help suggestions on the worst current adverts and seeing what can be done about them.
I’ll also delve into my vault to rip one of the biggest twats to sit in Parliament since the corn laws and puzzling over another vintage ad and what we were all having for tea in 1986. Elongated burgers masquerading as steaks, it turns out. But first, this…
On The Beach Advert - The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
Hello scum! Nearly time for that one time of the year you don’t hate yourself and your entire family! It’s the most wonderful time of the year!
Just picture the vast amounts of all-inclusive you’ll be able to scarf down, all the while trying not to think of how quickly the day you have to leave whatever passes for paradise in your dismally shrunken worldview is approaching and head home to your rest-of-the-year grief hovel!
Look at your spouse. Disgusting eh? But maybe on holiday you’ll both find a sliver of the lust you once felt for one another and get enough Sol down your neck to make it through a perfunctory near-silent fumble while your camping-bed-bound kids, barely a few yards away and separated by a thin wooden screen, screw their eyes up and pretend they’re somewhere else.
£40 for sun loungers at the beach? If only you’d bought the beach umbrellas. Then again, you’d only have had to carry them down that surprisingly sharp embankment full of sharp scrub that whipped at your bare, sunburned shins. Oh well, better drink another beer and reread the first page of that Baldacci novel you couldn’t give a fuck about.
Look at the lad – mocking his sister with his intact ice-cream. Better make a mental note to push him in the pool later and pretend you’re just having a laugh. He’ll probably burst into tears or something. Heh! Oh, it’s the most wonderful time of the year!
Feeling the sand between your feet - what’s so good about that anyway? Tiny grains of glass rubbing up against one of the most sensitive parts of your body? You hate the sand between my feet! The office isn’t so bad really…
Oh fuck, here come those blokes who try to sell you a paragliding package - the one the boy has been going on about. Better pretend you haven’t seen them. Why can’t he be happy with getting his hair braided and looking at his bloody tablet? You’re totally taking the girl when the divorce comes through.
Meet Lord Gavin Williamson
I’d like you to meet Gavin Williamson. Not in real life - chances are that would be a genuinely horrifying experience that would involve something made of leather, your buttocks and the man himself crying, wanking and saluting at the same time.
No, I mean virtually - and via his social media feeds, which I trawled for your amusement / horror (delete as appropriate) and I followed with a cold shower and ten-week programme of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
Gavin was, of course, a right-hand man to Theresa May and Boris Johnson - before he was sacked by both of them for being a gigantic arsehead anyway. Being fired by Johnson, in particular, for being hopeless must be like being sacked by King Solomon for bigamy (or, for that matter, Boris Johnson).
You might think a man who released a picture of himself as chief whip with an actual whip placed on his desk would be beyond parody. Maybe so, but Gav is like a human embodiment of self-parody.
Imagine Alan Partridge crossed with David Brent and a dash of that bloke Ralph Fiennes plays in Schindler’s List and you might be somewhere close to picturing the walking tragedy that is Lord Gavin Williamson – a man for whom irony is merely an adjective he might use to describe the fireplaces he once sold.
Anyway, click below for an exhaustive list of his greatest Accidental Partridges below, so many and so cringe-inducing that the Accidental Partridge meme was discontinued with the universal agreement of every world government.
This week’s vintage ad - Bird’s Eye grillsteaks: “Hope it’s chips!”
True story: Years after the Birds Eye rubber sponge adverts had graced the fucking enormous tellies of 80s suburbia I could not only remember all the words, but approximate all accents, singing voices and even expressions of the builders on their way home to what we know all workies desire most in the world: chips (but probably as a prelude to a few pints of mild, episode of Sportsnight featuring a nil-all draw between Millwall and QPR and a bunk-up with the missus in the dark, as was also the way in the 80s).
This was the sort of tea, of course that literally every last one of the 50-odd million people who lived in Great Britain back then ate every night, this being at least 20 years before anyone thought to make the internet, make silken tofu katsu or make the underclass ride pedal bikes through sleet and pollution so you can enjoy a lukewarm pizza for £27 and still not tip the rider.
A simpler time then. One one Dangermouse, after school malt loaf snacks and David Mellor shagging his mistress in a Chelsea shirt. Also a time for adverts addressing women directly and telling them to buy some meat for their husbands, lest she fail in her wifely duties.
Incredibly Steakhouse Grills are still available, which makes them about 22 million times more long-lived than a Liz Truss government. These days they’re called ‘beef grills’ - perhaps in recognition that some pressed mince is only really akin to an actual steak in the same way that signing an online petition is preventing the destruction of the Amazon.
These days Birds Eye recommends you serve them to kids with ‘roasties and seasonal vegetables’. It’s for builders and it comes with chips, you philistines, chips.
Well, we made it to week two. Who saw that coming? Please like and share and make sure you flag up your own personal nemesis in advertising form. I’m as powerless to do anything about it as you are, but you might at least have the satisfaction of your most hated ads get a roasting.